P a r t 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 9 4 Project Overview 294 Origins of A*CENSUS 297 Collaboration 297 Survey Development 297 Responses 300
Follow-up with Nonrespondents 301
Special Consultants 304
Context 304
Analysis 306
Reporting and Publication 307
Research Access 308
Action and Implementation 309
P a r t 2 . A * C E N S U S : A C a l l t o A c t i o n 3 1 1
A Generational Shift 311
The Challenge Ahead for Archivists in the United States 313 Strengthening the Archival Profession’s Infrastructure 320
Some Suggested Topics for Follow-up Studies 323
Conclusion 326
P a r t 3 . A * C E N S U S : A C l o s e r L o o k 3 2 8
Current Position 328
Current Employer 328
Demographics 333
Geographical Distribution and Density 343
Credentials 345
Job Functions and Specializations 352
Salaries 357
Career Paths 363
Issues 370
Professional Identity and Affiliation 371
P a r t 4 . G r a d u a t e A r c h i v a l E d u c a t i o n 4 0 6
Introduction and Overview 406
Education of Archivists and the A*CENSUS 407
Students in Graduate Programs 409
Faculty 419
Doctoral Education 421
Mentorship, Internships, Recruitment, and Replacement 422
Conclusions 426
P a r t 5 . C o n t i n u i n g E d u c a t i o n 4 3 0
Introduction and Overview 430
The Questions 430 Prior Study 431 A*CENSUS Findings 431 Summary 481 P a r t 6 . D i v e r s i t y 4 8 2 Overview 482 Introduction 483
What Are the Numbers? 484
The Accidental Archivist 485
Age 488
Training and Education 489
Conclusions and Strategies for Future Growth 490
Strategies for Outreach 491
P a r t 7 . L e a d e r s h i p 4 9 4
Introduction 494
Leadership in Professions 495
The Archival Profession 495
A*CENSUS Findings 497 Conclusions 505 P a r t 8 . C e r t i f i c a t i o n 5 0 7 Overview 507 Introduction 508 Certification in General 508 Archival Certification 509
Previous Surveys of Certified Archivists 512
Certified Archivists in the A*CENSUS 513
Some Demographic Features 514
Salary and Professional Membership 515
Continuing Education 524
Importance of Certain Qualifications in Hiring 524
A p p e n d i c e s
Appendix A Survey Research, Statistical Analyses, and Environmental Scans Within Archival and Allied
Professional Communities 1956-2003 529
Appendix B Summaries of Selected Surveys of Individual
Archivists in the United States, 1956-1998 532
Appendix C Data Privacy Agreement 539
Appendix D Technical Notes: Calculating Approximate Means in the
A*CENSUS 540 Appendix E Results of Nonrespondent Follow-Up Telephone Survey 546
Appendix F Questions Used in the A*CENSUS Survey 552
Appendix G Additional Table for Part 1 587
Appendix H Additional Illustration and Tables for Part 3 588
Appendix I Additional Illustration for Part 4 602
Appendix J Additional Tables for Part 5 603
Appendix K Additional Illustrations for Part 6 607
Appendix L Additional Illustrations and Tables for Part 7 610 Appendix M Sources Used in Compiling A*CENSUS Reports 616
Supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services www.imls.gov
P a r t 1 . I n t r o d u c t i o n
Victoria Irons Walch
Principal Research Consultant
P r o j e c t O v e r v i e w
The A*CENSUS—Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States—is the first broadscale survey of individual archivists in the United States in nearly thirty years. The survey, conducted by mail and online during a two-month period in 2004, asked archivists about their positions, employers, demographics, credentials, job functions and specialization, salaries, career paths, issues, professional identity, and affiliation. There were additional questions for those with management responsibilities, and specific questions for members of certain professional associations. Inclusive in scope and deep in detail, A*CENSUS has produced a comprehensive picture of the archival profession and its people early in the twenty-first century.
The A*CENSUS resulted from a true collaborative effort within the profession. Just as important, the findings suggest that even greater collabora-tion is needed to meet impending demographic changes and critical needs in education.
The survey reached a significant portion of the archival community. The participants’ names were drawn from the membership lists of fifty-nine archival associations, among other sources. A total of 5,620 individuals responded from a mailing list of just under 12,000 individuals, for an overall response rate of 47.2%. The proportion of respondents who were members of archival associa-tions was much higher, ranging as high as 77.5% for the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA) and 82.7% for the Society of American Archivists (SAA).
The data from the A*CENSUS help us to understand how the profile of archivists in the United States is changing. The survey makes it clear that the archival profession in the United States, like every other sector in our society, is facing a number of challenges as members of the Baby Boom generation, born from 1946 to 1964, prepare to retire. This is just the latest of a series of major generational transitions that the archival profession in the United States has experienced at intervals of roughly thirty to thirty-five years. Analysis of the A*CENSUS data suggests that U.S. archivists face several interrelated challenges:
• Recruiting enough new practitioners to replace retiring archivists; • Attracting archivists who will reflect the diversity of society at large;
• Strengthening our collective technical skills by rethinking and retooling our recruitment and training efforts; and
• Identifying effective methods for transferring the knowledge and values acquired through decades of experience to members of the next generation of archivists.
The A*CENSUS also points to areas in the archival infrastructure that must be strengthened. There is a need to:
• Expand continuing education opportunities and delivery options; • Ensure the viability of graduate archival education by addressing the
shortage of faculty; and
• Rectify the lack of provisions for the preservation and use of statistical data about archivists, archival repositories, and the records they hold. The A*CENSUS project was led by SAA, but it was developed and shaped by a broad-based Working Group representing the profession geographically, professionally, and demographically. More than sixty national, regional, state, and local archival associations, several educators and educational institutions, and a number of colleagues in related professions contributed to the project during its three-year course.
A*CENSUS was one of the first projects supported through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Librarians for the 21st Century program, which was launched in March 2003. Topics highlighted in the call for proposals issued by the IMLS matched a number of issues that had already been identified as priorities by several archival associations, including SAA: education and train-ing, credentials, aging of the profession, diversity, and leadership. The SAA Council had decided in early 2003 to do a member survey and, when the IMLS program was announced, saw quickly that SAA goals dovetailed nicely with this grant opportunity. As it happened, many other archival associations at the national, regional, state, and local levels were considering membership surveys of their own and, when approached to participate in the A*CENSUS, signed on willingly. This was clearly a project that came at just the right time and fit the right need.
During 2004 and 2005, the project’s principal research consultant, Victoria Irons Walch, worked with Market Strategies, Inc., the survey research firm that conducted the survey, and with the A*CENSUS Working Group and six special consultants to analyze and interpret the data. The special consultants and their areas of focus were: Elizabeth Yakel of the University of Michigan and Jeannette Allis Bastian of Simmons College (graduate archival education); Nancy Zimmelman of the California State Archives (continuing education); Brenda Banks of the Georgia Archives (diversity); Susan E. Davis of the University of Maryland (leadership); and Anne P. Diffendal, consulting historian/archivist, Lincoln, Nebraska (certification). The consultants and Working Group mem-bers led several discussions about the findings at SAA and other association
meetings during 2004 and 2005, generating feedback that provided additional insights into the data. (See Gallery of Contributors for more background on the consultants and Table 1.1, A*CENSUS Working Group, for more information about the Working Group members.)
This report is far from the “final word,” however. With its publication, the project enters a phase of broad professional discussion of results and impera-tives. Analysis can and should continue. A public use data file is available for research use through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. All who have been involved in the project hope that students, scholars, association leaders, and others will dig further into the data for new and additional insights.
The complete A*CENSUS final report package comprises more than what appears in this issue of The American Archivist. The full text of the reports and their accompanying detailed tables and graphs were too voluminous to print in the journal in their entirety. A substantial body of additional material, including more detailed analysis and many more tables and graphics, is avail-able on the SAA website (www.archivists.org). References to specific tavail-ables and graphics, including those on the website, can be found throughout the reports in this issue. (Note: Tables and graphic illustrations are titled and captioned using sequential numbers that are based on the specific “part” of this report (Parts 1 through 8) to which they belong. This results in double numeration for tables and graphics from Parts 1,2,4,5,6,7, and 8. A system of triple numeration is used in Part 3, which has ten numbered sections, to ensure that all tables and graphics in this issue and on the website carry a unique number.)
You will find the following components in this article:
• This introduction, providing an overview and information on the process used to collect and analyze the survey data.
• An overall analysis of the findings and implications, punctuated with specific action items developed by the Working Group and the research consultants.
• A condensed version of Walch’s overall analysis of the survey questions and responses. (The online version of the overall analysis is significantly longer and contains many more tables and graphics.)
• The five special consultant reports, accompanied by many of their tables and graphics. (The remainder of the tables and graphics referenced in the special research consultants’ reports are at www.archivists.org.) These reports highlight a number of challenges that the archival profession faces. Archivists must navigate through a transition while also managing a transformation. The A*CENSUS results provide a good starting point. The collaborative success of the A*CENSUS itself suggests that when the needs are great, the collective energy and commitment of the profession can be a worthy match.
O r i g i n s o f A * C E N S U S
Plans for the A*CENSUS developed very quickly. In February 2003 the SAA Council decided that it was time to conduct a survey of SAA’s membership. Peter Hirtle, then president of SAA, and Debra Nolan, then acting co-executive director, contacted Vicki Walch1about developing a grant proposal to conduct
a survey.
In early March 2003, at about the same time that discussions about a possi-ble SAA grant proposal began, the IMLS announced the availability of funding under the Librarians for the 21st Century program. This new program was intended to lay the groundwork for recruiting the next generation of librarians. When Hirtle, Nolan, and Walch became aware of this IMLS program, they realized that SAA might be able to meet its own goals while also addressing much broader interests for the entire U.S. archival community. SAA had to move fast, however, because the IMLS proposals were due April 15, 2003.
C o l l a b o r a t i o n
From the beginning, the A*CENSUS project was conceived of as a collaborative effort, not one to be led solely by SAA. To capture a true picture of the archival profession in the United States, SAA leaders knew that it was important to open the project to a broad range of participants. Walch was aware of at least sixty professional associations serving archivists in the United States at the national, regional, state, and local levels. As she began contacting them, she discovered that many were considering membership surveys of their own. Within two weeks, six national and seven regional associations had agreed to write letters of support, to share their mailing lists, and to designate a repre-sentative to participate in a working group if the project were funded. The grant application was soon completed and submitted. In late October 2003, IMLS notified SAA that the grant was approved.
S u r v e y D e v e l o p m e n t
By November 13, 2003, SAA had assembled a Working Group of twenty-eight people (Table 1.1.) for a first meeting in Chicago. The Working Group spent two days defining areas of inquiry and laying out a plan for conducting the survey. The forward-looking goals of the IMLS grant program provided a conceptual
1At the time, Walch was serving as the part-time program director for the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC), but took on the A*CENSUS project outside of her COSHRC-related duties. COSHRC is now the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), and Walch is its executive director.
Table 1.1. A*CENSUS Working Group
Working Group Chair
Peter Hirtle, Cornell University National Associations
Academy of Certified Archivists Greg Hunter, Long Island University
Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, American Library Association Mary Lacy, Library of Congress
National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators John Stewart, National Archives and Records Administration
Council of State Historical Records Coordinators
Roy Tryon, South Carolina Department of Archives and History Society of American Archivists
Solveig DeSutter, Education Director Association of Moving Image Archivists
Karen Gracy, University of Pittsburgh Regional Associations
Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists Gordon Daines, Brigham Young University Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Michael Knies, University of Scranton Midwest Archives Conference
Peter Gottlieb, Wisconsin Historical Society New England Archivists
Ann Sauer, Tufts University Northwest Archivists, Inc.
Jodie Ann Foley, Montana Historical Society
Society of California Archivists and the Western Archives Institute Nancy Zimmelman, California State Archives
Society of Southwest Archivists
Cindy Smolovik, National Archives and Records Administration (successor to David Gracy, University of Texas, Austin) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archives Institute
Brenda Banks, The Georgia Archives Tribal and Native American Archivists
Marnie Atkins, Table Bluff Reservation – Wiyot Tribe
Modern Archives Institute and the National Archives and Records Administration Mary Rephlo, National Archives and Records Administration
Educators from Graduate Archival Programs Jeannette Bastian, Simmons College Richard Cox, University of Pittsburgh Susan Davis, University of Maryland Elizabeth Dow, Louisiana State University Peter Wosh, New York University Elizabeth Yakel, University of Michigan A*CENSUS Staff
Nancy Beaumont, SAA Executive Director, Principal Investigator and Project Director Victoria Irons Walch, Principal Research Consultant
Jodie Strickland, A*CENSUS Project Assistant
template that served the archival profession well, and the A*CENSUS project was designed to place special emphasis on several topics that relate directly to prepar-ing the next generation of archivists: education and trainprepar-ing, agprepar-ing of the profession, diversity, leadership, and credentials. All of these issues were already on the agendas of many of the professional associations that serve archivists at the national, regional, state, and local levels. This made the IMLS program an especially good fit for pursuing existing archival priorities.
At the outset of the project, Working Group members realized the difficulty of defining firm boundaries for the universe of potential survey respon-dents. The Working Group decided to cast a wide net in order to capture infor-mation about all individuals who work with archival records but who may or may not call themselves “archivists.” Working Group members provided critical service to the project by publicizing the survey—encouraging the members of their own organizations to participate and spreading the word to others.
This willingness to cooperate was also evident as the staff compiled the sur-vey mailing list. The Working Group had decided to use association mailing lists as the primary source for the survey sample because it believed that joining an archival association is a strong indicator of some level of identity with the profession as a whole. Project staff contacted sixty-five archival associations in the United States and received 16,581 names from fifty-nine associations.
The project staff also sought out mailing lists from a variety of other sources. The National Archives and Records Administration provided a list of its 707 staff members in the Archivist (1420) job series and in grades nine and above in the Archives Specialist (1421) job series. The state archives, collectively, submitted lists of 264 staff members and 790 other individuals who were on their mailing lists. The mailing list also included 299 participants in the Modern Archives Institute and Western Archives Institute in 2002, 2003, and 2004, and fifty-nine participants in the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archives Training Institute. In an effort to reach those caring for Native American collections, staff also contacted 512 individuals who had attended two confer-ences on tribal libraries and archives and everyone on the contact lists for the Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).
Two major associations serving professionals in closely allied fields, ARMA International and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH), could not share their members’ e-mail addresses because of policies established to guarantee their members’ privacy, but, to the project’s benefit, each actively promoted the A*CENSUS via its own paper and electronic-mail facilities.
The initial combined list, which contained many duplicate names, totaled 19,355 names (see Table 1.2., A*CENSUS mailing list, in Appendix G). Because it is common for an individual archivist to belong to several associations, an extensive “de-duping” process yielded a final mailing list of just under 12,000 individuals.
With the survey questions sketched out and the mailing list ready, SAA engaged Market Strategies, Inc. (MSI), a survey research management firm headquartered in Livonia, Michigan, to develop and deliver both the online and paper survey instruments. The project schedule was ambitious, targeting April to June 2004 for the survey so that preliminary data would be available in time for the SAA annual meeting in August 2004. (A complete list of the survey questions is in Appendix F.)
R e s p o n s e s
A total of 5,620 individuals responded to the A*CENSUS survey, according to the official totals compiled by the project’s statisticians. Of these, 5,428 responded using an ID number that was provided via e-mail and surface mail communications; 192 took the no-ID version of the survey, having learned about the A*CENSUS via news releases, announcements on listservs, or other publicity efforts. The primary method for responding was through the online survey instrument: 5,015 individuals responded via the web-based survey and 605 individuals responded by surface mail.
Of the 5,620 respondents, 5,071 completed the entire survey and 549 submitted partial data (Table 1.3., Number of respondents to A*CENSUS, at www.archivists.org). Although 5,620 is the “official” A*CENSUS response count, a total of 5,492 people actually answered the first question (which required a response in order to proceed); this indicates that 128 people opened the survey online, saw the first page of text, and then closed it without responding to any of the questions. The remaining questions were optional, and the number of responses fell slowly as people progressed through the survey. One of the last questions in the survey asked respondents to specify their gender; a total of 4,811 individuals responded to that question. This is a good reminder that a “com-plete” survey does not mean that a respondent answered every question; it sim-ply means that he or she clicked through to the official “end” of the online form. Given that the average time required to complete the survey was about forty-five minutes, the fact that there were “complete” responses from more than 5,000 individuals who were willing to stick with it to the end is remarkable.
The official response rate calculated by MSI is 47.18%.2Although not as
high as we might have hoped for overall, it compares favorably to the response
Table 1.3. Number of respondents to A*CENSUS
Submitted complete surveys 5,071 90.2%
Submitted partial surveys 421 7.5%
Opened survey but exited without
responding to any questions 128 2.3%
rate of the last comprehensive survey of archivists in the United States conducted by David Bearman in 1982.3Of the 4,000 individuals whom Bearman
contacted, 1,717 responded, for a response rate of 43%. The A*CENSUS was distributed to nearly three times as many people (almost 12,000) and had responses from, proportionally, slightly more than did the Bearman survey. (See Context section of this article for more about the significance of Bearman’s survey in relation to the A*CENSUS.)
Even more significant, the A*CENSUS respondents represented a sizable proportion of most of the national and regional archival associations and many of the state and local archival associations. For twelve associations, the number of respondents who indicated that they belonged to those organizations topped 70% of the total number of individual members. The number of individuals indi-cating membership in the Society of American Archivists (2,409) was equivalent to 82.7% of SAA’s individual members at the time. For the Academy of Certified Archivists, 593 indicated membership, equivalent to 77.5% of ACA’s members. The number of A*CENSUS respondents who said they belonged to each archival association is shown in Table 1.4. Regional breakdowns are in Table 1.5.
Given the remarkable response rate from the associations, the A*CENSUS proved to be a good investment for those associations that were considering membership surveys of their own. The last full SAA membership survey in 1997 achieved a usable response rate of just 37% of its members. For members of the Working Group and others who assisted with the A*CENSUS, the high response rate from the various associations rewarded the many contributions they had made from the outset. The A*CENSUS succeeded in reaching a significant proportion of the archival community.
F o l l o w - u p w i t h N o n r e s p o n d e n t s
At the end of the data collection period, 1,200 nonresponders were randomly selected for a follow-up survey by telephone. Of those selected, 586 had a valid phone number listed in the sample file, and 227 of those completed the nonresponse study.
The follow-up telephone survey collected basic demographic and occupa-tional information about the nonrespondents and asked them to indicate why they did not respond to the main survey. Because we cast the survey net so broadly, one goal of the follow-up was to assess what proportion of nonresponders simply
2A detailed description of how MSI calculated the response rate is contained in the MSI methodology report, which is available along with the full versions of the A*CENSUS reports on the SAA website. Response rate reported was calculated using the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers (AAPOR) Response Rate #4. Response rate calculation includes only those responses received from respondents on the original sample list and not responses from the no-ID version of the survey. 3David Bearman, “1982 Survey of the Archival Profession,” American Archivist 46 (Spring 1983): 233-241.
Table 1.4. Response rate for each archival association
The response rates calculated in this table (c) are based on the number of individual names in the mailing list submitted by each association (a) compared to the number of respondents who indicated that they were members of each association (b). The darker shading indicates associa-tions whose response rate was at or above 70%; lighter shading indicates response rates of at least 50% but less than 70%.
(a) (b) (c)
# of indiv # indicating Response
Association names in list membership rate
NationalAssociations
Academy of Certified Archivists 765 593 77.5%
Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious 358 179 50.0% Association of Catholic Diocesan Archivists 216 91 42.1% Association of Moving Image Archivists 641 238 37.1% Council of State Historical Records Coordinators 79 55 69.6% National Association of Government Archives and
Records Administrators 680* 191 *See note below Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, ALA 554 343 61.9% Society of American Archivists 2913 2409 82.7% Regional Associations
Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists 122 84 68.9% Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference 898 748 83.3%
Midwest Archives Conference 894 695 77.7%
New England Archivists 665 399 60.0%
New England Archivists of Religious Institutions 94 49 52.1%
Northwest Archivists, Inc 161 133 82.6%
Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists 173 95 54.9%
Society of Southwest Archivists 521 377 72.4%
State Associations
Association of Hawaii Archivists 27 24 88.9%
Consortium of Iowa Archivists 50 16 32.0%
Kentucky Council on Archives 122 66 54.1%
Louisiana Archives and Manuscripts Association 116 45 38.8%
Michigan Archival Association 215 102 47.4%
New Hampshire Archives Group 46 23 50.0%
Oklahoma Conservation Congress 43 14 32.6%
Palmetto Archives, Libraries and Museum Council
on Preservation 92 22 23.9%
Society of Alabama Archivists 92 51 55.4%
Society of California Archivists 639 299 46.8%
Society of Florida Archivists 177 83 46.9%
Society of Georgia Archivists 206 121 58.7%
Society of Indiana Archivists 92 45 48.9%
Society of Mississippi Archivists 97 29 29.9%
Society of North Carolina Archivists 83 100 120.5%
Society of Ohio Archivists 125 100 80.0%
Society of Tennessee Archivists 170 60 35.3%
South Carolina Archival Association 193 76 39.4% Local Associations
Archivists of Religious Institutions (primarily NY City area) 99 57 57.6%
Archivists of the Houston Area 53 24 45.3%
Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York 510 202 39.6% Association of St. Louis Area Archivists 82 58 70.7%
Table 1.4. cont. Response rate for each archival association
(a) (b) (c)
# of indiv # indicating Response
Association names in list membership rate
Capital Area Archivists (NY) 93 18 19.4%
Charleston Archives, Libraries and Museums Council 47 15 31.9%
Chicago Area Archivists 118 93 78.8%
Cleveland Archival Roundtable 123 28 22.8%
Coalition of Archivists and Records Professionals 27 7 25.9% in Western Pennsylvania
Delaware Valley Archivists Group 211 98 46.4%
Greater New Orleans Archivists 51 20 39.2%
Kansas City Area Archivists 141 71 50.4%
Lake Ontario Archives Conference 208 45 21.6%
Library Council of Southeastern Wisconsin, 33 15 45.5% Archives Committee
Metroplex Archivists (Dallas-Ft. Worth) 67 22 32.8%
Miami Valley Archives Roundtable 63 22 34.9%
San Antonio Archivists 38 5 13.2%
Seattle Area Archivists 71 44 62.0%
Twin Cities Archives Roundtable 53 44 83.0%
* The mailing list provided by NAGARA included its individual members plus a large number of contacts it had acquired through other sources, including lists of annual meeting attendees, workshop participants, publication purchasers, and vendors. NAGARA is primarily an institutional membership organization, although individuals are also able to join. The 191 A*CENSUS respondents who indicated that they were NAGARA members exceeds the total number of individual members, so it is likely that many of these individuals work for organizations that hold institutional member-ship. Because the mailing list contained a large number of nonmembers, and the number of responses indicates a mix of institutional and individual membership categories, we have not calculated a response rate for NAGARA.
Table 1.5. Response rate within each region reported as place of employment
Total, all % of all
Region* respondents respondents Regional archival association serving this region
New England 523 9.6% New England Archivists
Upper Mid-Atlantic 864 15.8% Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference Lower Mid-Atlantic 551 10.1% Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference South Atlantic 575 10.5% Southeast Archives and Records Conference South Central 376 6.9% Southeast Archives and Records Conference Great Lakes 879 16.1% Midwest Archives Conference
Plains 315 5.8% Midwest Archives Conference Mountain 218 4.0% Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists,
Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists, Northwest Archivists, Inc.
Southwest 389 7.1% Society of Southwest Archivists, Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists West 563 10.3% Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists Northwest 202 3.7% Northwest Archivists, Inc.
All respondents 5,455 100%
* See map in Figure 1.1. for which states are contained within each region. Source question: Q4 (state in which employed)
were ineligible to participate in the survey because they no longer worked in the archival field (thirteen of the 227, or 5.7%, were not eligible). We were also inter-ested in the occupational profile of nonresponders and found that they were much less likely to identify themselves as “archivists or manuscript curators” (25% of nonresponders chose this description versus 53% of responders) and much more likely to identify themselves as “working in another occupation or profes-sion” (29% of nonresponders versus 14% of responders). This reinforces our con-fidence in the presumption that the A*CENSUS captured data from a substantial proportion of the archival profession.
S p e c i a l C o n s u l t a n t s
In addition to the remarkable collaboration that occurred among organiza-tions, the A*CENSUS project was enriched by the intellectual and professional contributions of a number of experts. When the grant proposal was being written, the proposal developers contacted graduate archival educators and benefited sig-nificantly from the experience and knowledge gained through the earlier research of Yakel, Bastian, and Richard Cox, among others. This collegiality broadened and deepened as the project continued. The five areas of focus selected by the six special consultants, as described earlier, correspond to strate-gic priorities articulated by SAA and many of the other associations—graduate archival education (Yakel and Bastian), continuing education (Zimmelman), diversity (Banks), leadership (Davis), and certification (Diffendal). The reports produced by the consultants provide critical insight into these five areas and are included as individual, supplemental analyses that substantially augment the overall analysis of the A*CENSUS report.
C o n t e x t
The impact of the A*CENSUS survey is enhanced by two other major surveys that occurred in the U.S. archival community during 2004. The Heritage Health Index (HHI) survey was conducted by Heritage Preservation between July and December 2004, with a final report released in November 2005. The HHI survey collected detailed data intended to provide “a comprehensive pic-ture of the condition and preservation needs of this country’s collections.” Supported with funding from IMLS, it surveyed 15,000 repositories nation-wide and received responses from 3,370 archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and scientific organizations, including a 90% response rate from the institutions holding the nation’s largest and most significant collections.4
The Council of State Archivists (CoSA)5 conducted a comprehensive
survey of all state archives and records programs and State Historical Records Advisory Boards (SHRABs) between November 2004 and April 2005. Because the state archives are major repositories in most states, they often provide edu-cation and training to other archivists, either through the state archives or through the SHRABs that they administer. The CoSA survey collected data on the state archives and SHRAB organizations, as well as the programs and services that each provides to state and local governments, other archival repositories, users, K-12 educators, and the general public. It also collected data on entry-level salaries and qualifications for archivists and records managers and on salaries of managers of state archives and records management programs, thus complementing data gathered via the A*CENSUS.
Taken together, these surveys will provide a foundation for understanding and studying the individuals, institutions, and historical records that help define the archival profession in the United States. They will contribute to each asso-ciation’s understanding of the needs and priorities of its members and to each program administrator’s assessment of his or her own repository in relation to others of similar size and scope. And, of course, these surveys will furnish an abundant body of information for analysis from which articles, term papers, and theses should evolve during the next several years.
From the perspective of history, the surveys of 2004—especially the A*CENSUS—also provide a benchmark for comparison with earlier surveys of the archival profession. Appendix A provides a list of all known national surveys of the archival profession in the United States that preceded the A*CENSUS, as well as a number of major regional surveys. However, in trying to identify change in the profession over time, we have focused on comparisons of the A*CENSUS findings with the results from two previous efforts in particular: Bearman’s 1982 survey of SAA and regio nal archival association members and Ernst Posner’s 1956 survey of SAA members. These were both general in scope and tried to reach all members of the profession within their time periods.
Several other, more focused surveys occurred from 1970 to 1998. Robert Warner and Frank Evans attempted to understand the education and pre-paration of individuals working as archivists in 1970. Mabel Deutrich and Ben DeWhitt surveyed the profession to assess the status of women in 1979. In the 1990s, SAA conducted several surveys of its members regarding dues and member benefits. These surveys also collected some basic demographic and
5This survey was completed when CoSA was known as the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC). The organization changed its name to the Council of State Archivists in October 2005. CoSA also conducted a shorter follow-up survey of state archives and records programs in August-September 2006. Reports and data from all of CoSA’s surveys are available on its website: http://www.statearchivists.org/reports/.
educational data.6Appendix B contains synopses of the findings of six selected
surveys, as described above.
Finally, also noteworthy are recent surveys of Australian and other Anglophone archivists that complement the A*CENSUS results.7
A n a l y s i s
Analysis began when the final data set was delivered to Walch on July 22, 2004. She presented preliminary findings at a plenary session and to several groups during the SAA annual meeting in Boston, August 2-6, 2004. Members of the A*CENSUS Working Group received “banner books” containing data on their own associations’ members (or the entire data set if they were educators or other representatives) during a meeting of the Working Group on August 4. The banner books provided a first, quick reference tool for understanding the survey results. They contained tables for each question, with responses broken down according to five key characteristics—gender, age, race, employer, and position.8
The six special consultants received access to the full data set in mid-August 2004. The project consultants and SAA staff worked through the end of 2004 and during all of 2005 to analyze the data. Walch, as the project’s principal research consultant, oversaw the analysis process, coordinating work with the special con-sultants and with the survey research management firm, which provided techni-cal guidance throughout the process. Research protocols were carefully observed in conducting the analysis. For example, for all questions with responses given in ranges, such as “25-29” and “30-34” for ages and certain dollar ranges for other questions, specific steps were followed to calculate the “approximate mean” values for the answers given in those ranges. See Appendix D, Technical Notes: Calculating Approximate Means in the A*CENSUS.
Early in the analysis process, the consultants had to determine how to divide the United States into regions for reporting purposes. As is apparent in Table 1.5., the number of A*CENSUS respondents from some areas of the coun-try was much higher than in others. To ease comparisons among regions, we
6Ernst Posner, “What, Then, Is the American Archivist, This New Man?,” The American Archivist 20 (January 1957): 4-6; Frank B. Evans and Robert M. Warner, “American Archivists and Their Society: A Composite View,” The American Archivist 34 (April 1971): 157-72; Mabel E. Deutrich and Ben DeWhitt, “Survey of the Archival Profession – 1979,” The American Archivist 43 (Fall 1980): 527-5 35; David Bearman, “1982 Survey of the Archival Profession,” The American Archivist 46 (Spring 1983): 233-241; Society of American Archivists, Salary Survey. Conducted by Lawrence-Leiter & Co. (1996) [unpublished, SAA office files]; Society of American Archivists, Member Research Report. Conducted by Harrison Coerver & Associates, Management Consultants (1997) [unpublished, SAA office files].
7See Ann Pederson, “Understanding Ourselves and Others: Australian Archivists and Temperament,” paper delivered at the 1999 Conference of the Society of Australian Archivists. http://www.archivists.org.au/events/conf99/pederson.html.
8The A*CENSUS “banner books” and other information pertaining to the project are at http:// www.archivists.org/a-census/index.asp.
chose to keep the relative sizes of each region as uniform as possible. This led us to divide the Mid-Atlantic Region into two parts (Upper and Lower), for a total of eleven regions (Fig. 1.1.). The Midwest was divided into the Great Lakes and Plains states in part because of the large number of states that are consid-ered to be in the Midwest. Staff discovconsid-ered that substantial regional differences in the types of repositories in which archivists were employed led to variations in gender, salaries, and other factors.
An attempt to group the states in broad terms by common cultural charac-teristics became especially difficult for states on the edges of regions. Staff tried to replicate regions used in other statistical studies, and also asked the state archivists, among others, to identify the states to which they most often com-pared themselves. Finally, staff tried to group together the states served by the regional archival associations—easier to do in the East and Midwest and more difficult in the West, where memberships cross more state lines. Ultimately some arbitrary decisions had to be made.
R e p o r t i n g a n d P u b l i c a t i o n
Throughout the project, the staff and consultants attempted to publish and disseminate findings through channels selected to maximize access to and use of the information. Several preliminary reports were released via the SAA website during the winter and spring of 2005. As noted earlier, the A*CENSUS
reports published in this issue of The American Archivist are part of a larger pack-age that includes a substantial body of additional analysis, tables, and graphs available on the SAA website, www.archivists.org.
R e s e a r c h A c c e s s
A primary concern throughout the project has been to protect the privacy of individual respondents. The A*CENSUS provided respondents with the fol-lowing assurances regarding confidentiality: “Your responses are strictly confi-dential and only the aggregate data will be reported. Please be assured that your individual responses will never be published or identified.” At the same time, SAA and the full A*CENSUS Working Group were committed to making the data available for broadscale use. Consequently, project staff worked with the MSI team to prepare for public use a data set that protects the privacy of the sur-vey participants. The A*CENSUS Public Use Data File was completed and made available in August 2005 through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan.9
Every effort was made to ensure that the public use data set does not dis-close the identity of individual respondents either directly or by inference. No names, addresses, or other personal information that can directly identify an individual are included. In addition, some data were re-coded to reduce the risk of inadvertent disclosure. For example, while the original survey collected data on the state in which each respondent worked, the public use file identifies only the region for each individual to avoid inadvertent disclosure of identity for those living in states with small populations. As an additional measure of pro-tection, the public use file uses only five regions rather than the eleven used for analysis in the consultants’ reports (Fig. 1.2, U.S. regions used in A*CENSUS public use data set, and Table 1.6., Response rate within each region, A*CEN-SUS public use data set, at www.archivists.org).
There are additional privacy safeguards. As standard practice, the ICPSR asks all users of its data files to agree to certain policies regarding confidential-ity before they may access any of the data sets it holds. Throughout the project, SAA made it clear that any SAA staff members, project consultants, and A*CENSUS Working Group members who were afforded access to any A*CENSUS data other than the final public use files were expected to do their utmost to respect and protect the confidentiality of respondents. Those closest
9ICPSR makes documentation about the A*CENSUS file, including the data code book, available free on its website (http://www.icpsr.org). However, ICPSR membership is required for access to the data file itself. Individuals who would like to use the public use file but are not affiliated with an ICPSR member institution may contact SAA directly for an electronic copy of the file. SAA will ask all users of the public use file to agree to abide by certain policies regarding confidentiality before they are granted access to the data, just as ICPSR does.
to the material signed an agreement, based on the ICPSR policies, specifically prohibiting distribution of the raw data to anyone else. (See Appendix C for detail on the provisions of this data privacy agreement.)
A c t i o n a n d I m p l e m e n t a t i o n
The A*CENSUS Working Group convened in August 2005 to discuss the findings in all of the consultants’ reports, identify trends evident in the results, and develop recommendations. Two sessions at the 2005 SAA annual meeting focused on the A*CENSUS, one reviewing the special consultants’ findings and the other designed to encourage input on the Working Group’s Table 1.6. Response rate within each region, A*CENSUS public use data set
Total, all % of all
Region in which employed respondents respondents
New England 523 9.6% Mid-Atlantic 1,415 25.9% Midwest 1,194 21.9% South 951 17.4% West 1,372 25.2% All respondents 5,455 100%
Source question: Q4 (state in which employed)
recommendations from a broader audience. These sessions allowed the attendees to hear directly from the special consultants and to participate in an extended discussion on the overall findings as well as areas of particular interest.
This A*CENSUS report, which includes the special consultants’ reports, pre-sents specific action items. It also includes observations about current conditions and trends that will inform our collective efforts as we confront the dramatic gen-erational shifts, urgent educational needs, and diversity challenges that the pro-fession faces. The general analysis that follows, “Part 2. A*CENSUS: A Call to Action,” presents the action items in the context of an overall assessment of the survey findings and trends in the archival profession. An overview of the most sig-nificant survey findings is presented systematically in “Part 3. A*CENSUS: A Closer Look.” (A substantially more detailed version of this analysis and many of the tables and graphs from which the conclusions are drawn are available on the SAA website, www.archivists.org.) Finally, the special consultants’ reports probe deeply into the survey implications in those five key areas: graduate archival edu-cation, continuing eduedu-cation, diversity, leadership, and certification.
The challenges are formidable. But, with the fresh snapshot in time provided by A*CENSUS and with our approach tempered by historical perspective, we can begin.
P a r t 2 . A * C E N S U S : A C a l l t o A c t i o n
Victoria Irons Walch
Principal Research Consultant
A G e n e r a t i o n a l S h i f t
The A*CENSUS results make it clear that the archival profession in the United States, like every other sector in our society, is facing a number of challenges as members of the Baby Boom generation, born from 1946 to 1964, prepare to retire. The first of its members turned sixty on January 1, 2006. This is yet another milestone for a generation that has long been a dominant force in American culture. Boomers constitute an estimated 76.9 million Americans, representing 26.8% of the U.S. population and 42% of all house-holds. Collectively they have enormous economic power, controlling 50% of all consumer spending in the United States.10
The fact that the members of this generation are rapidly approaching retirement age has captured the attention of their employers, who realize that they must prepare to replace these workers. The challenge is significant. Today there are some 61.5 million Boomers in the U.S. workforce, but there are only 43.5 million in the generation that follows, often referred to as “Generation X,” born between 1965 and 1976. Close on the Xers’ heels, however, is a cohort even larger than the Boomers. Members of Generation Y (also called the Boom Echo) were born between 1977 and 1989 and are just beginning to enter the workforce in significant numbers. In 2005, for the first time, the combined number of Generations X and Y workers surpassed the number of Boomers.11
By 2010, Generation Y workers will outnumber Generation X workers in the United States. As Boomers retire, Generation Xers will assume senior management roles, but there may not be enough of them to fill all of the available positions. This will provide an unusual opportunity for members of the Boom Echo generation. They may find themselves on something of a fast track, given greater responsibility earlier in their careers than they or
10Kelly Greene, “When We’re All 64,” Wall Street Journal (October 3, 2005).
11Bruce Tulgan, “The Continuing Generational Shift in the Workforce,” Winning the Talent Wars (Rainmaker Thinking, March 15, 2005). http://www.rainmakerthinking.com/backwttw/2005/ mar15.htm.
their supervisors might have anticipated.12They will have to ramp up their skills
very quickly.
Like every other sector of the American workforce, the archival profession has within it a large number of Boomer workers. Many will begin retiring in the next decade. Archivists and their librarian colleagues recognized several years ago that they needed to take action to responsibly manage the coming generational turnover.13It was in response to this need that the Institute of Museum and Library
Services launched the Librarians for the 21st Century initiative in 2003 to under-write the training of new librarians and to support associated research projects. The A*CENSUS, as one of the first projects funded by the IMLS initiative, was designed to help clarify the issues and give statistical validity to the impressions that had been forming about the characteristics of archivists in the United States—a first step toward a solution for the generational shift coming in the archival profession.
C y c l e s o f A r c h i v a l G e n e r a t i o n s
Major generational transitions in the archival profession have occurred at intervals of roughly thirty to thirty-five years. In the late 1890s, American archivists first came together within the American Historical Association, even-tually forming the Conference of Archivists in 1909. Many of the first state archives were created during this same period. The mid-1930s brought two important institutions to the profession with the establishment of the National Archives in 1934 and the Society of American Archivists in 1936. Both helped to coalesce a professional identity among individuals.
The next generational transition was really more an upheaval. Patrick Quinn observed that, in the late 1960s, “the founding members of SAA and the American archival profession gave way to a new generation shaped by a differ-ent set of social conditions.”14The 1970s saw a huge influx of new archivists (the
Baby Boomers who are still present in such large numbers); the creation of many new repositories, particularly in academic institutions;15and rapid growth
12Tulgan, ibid.
13Rebecca T. Lenzini provides a good overview of various library association efforts in this area in Lenzini, “The Graying of the Library Profession: A Survey of Our Professional Association and Their Responses,” Searcher 10:7 (July/August 2002). http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jul02/lenzini.htm.
14Patrick M. Quinn, “Historians and Archivists: The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Midwestern Archivist 2:2 (1977): 5-13.
15Ildiko Pogany DeAngelis notes that many historical societies and museums opened during the 1970s because the U.S. Bicentennial celebration spawned a broad public interest in history. DeAngelis, “Graduate Training in Museum Studies: A Path for the Recruitment, Education, and Advancement of Museum Professionals,” paper delivered at the “Choices and Challenges Symposium,” Benson Ford Research Center (October 8-10, 2004). http://www.thehenryford.org/research/publications/sympo-sium2004/papers/deangelis.pdf.
in the number of professional associations serving archivists in the United States. The A*CENSUS suggests that the number of individuals working in U.S. archives has roughly tripled in the intervening years, a direct reflection of this expansion.
T h e C h a l l e n g e A h e a d f o r A r c h i v i s t s i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s
Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the archival profession is poised to make another major transition. The A*CENSUS data will be valuable in helping us to understand how the profile of archivists in the United States is changing and how to prepare for the coming changes.
The profession faces several inherent challenges as it begins this next generational turnover:
1. Recruiting enough new practitioners to fill all of the positions vacated by the large number of retirements expected in the next decade. 2. Ensuring that recruitment efforts focus on attracting archivists who
more closely reflect the diversity of society at large.
3. Rethinking and retooling our recruitment and training efforts so that archivists have the skills necessary for managing records created in a variety of digital forms and for using information technologies to enhance access to and use of collections.
4. Identifying effective methods for transferring the knowledge and values acquired through decades of experience from those in the current generation to those who will take their place.
R e c r u i t i n g t o R e p l a c e R e t i r i n g A r c h i v i s t s
From a purely numerical standpoint, the recruitment issue may not be as dire as it first appears, at least in the short run. Surveys of history and library graduate schools indicate that more than enough people are now graduating from the programs at these schools—people who might be willing to fill open archival positions if they were made aware of them. In fact, there seems to be a shortage of available archival jobs at present, and Boomers will not begin to leave their current positions in substantial numbers for several more years.
For the next five to ten years, therefore, it is likely that there will not be enough positions to accommodate all of the Generation Y graduates who might be interested in archival work. This is a problem that we share with librarians and historians. Several recent studies indicate that both library schools and grad-uate history programs are taking in more students than they can successfully
place upon graduation.16 If new graduates from the two types of academic
programs that most often prepare individuals to work as archivists cannot easily find jobs in any of the three fields, they will be forced to seek other careers. If so, then the problem of “real numbers” will become an urgent concern between 2010 and 2020.
Brenda Banks points out in her report, “A*CENSUS: Report on Diversity,” that, if we know we will need archival workers a decade from now, it is important to start recruiting efforts today. She recommends that we work with educators to find ways to encourage people as young as elementary- or secondary-school age to consider a career in archives. Children now in sixth grade will be gradu-ating from college in ten years. If we can capture their interest now, they may eventually go on to graduate school for a specialized degree in archives, and could be entering the workforce at about the same time that the largest number of Baby Boomer archivists will be leaving. Banks also observes that important career choices are made in middle school. National History Day, Inc., programs and summer history camps could be excellent early recruiting vehicles for the archival profession.
Action items:
• Monitor the rate of retirement among older workers and watch for sectors in need of new workers.
• Look for ways in which to make room in the archival profession now for new workers so that we do not lose a large cohort of potential archivists to other fields.
• Support public awareness and education campaigns, such as the expan-sion of Archives Month to a nationwide event, to raise overall public awareness about the importance of archives and archival work.
• Actively encourage elementary- and secondary-school students to con-sider archives as a career choice through participation in such activities as National History Day and history camps.
• Prepare informational materials about archives as a career choice for secondary-school counselors and for college faculty in the humanities, social sciences, and departments of technology.
16Recent surveys of history graduate programs show there are far more graduates than available teaching jobs. Robert B. Townsend, “AHA Job Market Report 2004,” AHA Perspectives (January 2005). http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2005/0501/0501new1.cfm. Another study indi-cates that library schools are recruiting more people into their MLS programs than can be placed suc-cessfully upon graduation, noting that while some 5,000 MLS graduates are expected each year through 2010, an average of only 4,100 library jobs will open annually. Rachel Holt and Adrienne L. Strock, “The Entry Level Gap,“ Library Journal (May 1, 2005). http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/ CA527965.html.
R e c r u i t i n g t o B r o a d e n D i v e r s i t y
As the overall U.S. population becomes more diverse, archivists must work hard to make sure that our own ranks reflect these changes. If we mea-sure the ethnic and racial makeup of the archival community against the U.S. population as a whole, we can see that the archival profession has a long way to go to even begin to reflect the country’s ethnic and racial composi-tion. Our profession will be even more challenged as the next several decades unfold.
Today, approximately 25% of the population as a whole belongs to an ethnic minority, as compared with less than 8% of all A*CENSUS respondents and less than 10% of SAA members in 2004. The proportion of nonwhites in the general population rises to 33% in the Generation X cohort and is even larger among younger generations. Some 37% of kindergartners in the United States in 1997 were nonwhite.17By 2003, minorities constituted 42% of public school
enrollment in the nation. Hispanics are growing in number most rapidly, surpassing African Americans for the first time in 2002 to account for 19% of the students enrolled in 2003.18
Banks’s report on diversity examines responses from members of ethnic and racial minority groups in some detail. She advocates for early contacts with elementary- and secondary-school students as one path toward improving diver-sity. These contacts could provide us with important opportunities to reach members of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups and convince them to consider archival work as a career. General public awareness campaigns like Archives Month could have a larger and complementary beneficial effect, encouraging more archival vocations as well as greater attention to pursuing archival projects within under-documented ethnic communities.
To increase the pool of new archivists, including those from diverse backgrounds, the profession could consider how to make archival educa-tion more attractive and accessible to a broad range of students. There are interesting models to consider in allied professional organizations. One is the American Library Association’s Spectrum Initiative and Leadership Institute, which combines scholarships with an intense, four-day institute designed to “help create a sustainable and long-term diversity approach for the profession.” Its proponents note that it is important to infuse “cultural, ceremonial, and management curricula in the . . . agenda so attendees note and respect different communication styles, values, and traditions.”19 The
17ASAE Foundation, Generational Synergy (Washington, DC: American Society of Association Executives, 2001): 7.
18Kavan Peterson, “Diversity Fuels Student Enrollment Boom,” StateLine.org (June 2, 2005). http:// www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=35088. 19Paula Tsurutani, “Getting a Place at the Table,” Association Management (December 2002): 58-59.
Spectrum Initiative also emphasizes the importance of developing strong networks among these professionals, a key recommendation also made by Banks in her report.
Action items:
• Target minority populations through outreach activities to young people, encouraging them to consider archival work as a career choice.
• Develop public awareness and education campaigns to raise conscious-ness within minority groups about the need to document their commu-nities and organizations, and, additionally, to encourage them to become archivists.
• Continue to offer institutes like the Historically Black Colleges and Universities Archives Institute and the Tribal Archives Institutes (sponsored by the Western Archives Institute) and develop new institutes that focus on advancing archival education and training within other racial and ethnic communities.
• Facilitate ongoing networking opportunities among graduates of these institutes and establish similar networks for others for whom no similar institute programs yet exist.
• Establish minority fellowship or scholarship programs similar to those offered by the American Association of Museums and the American Library Association.
R e c r u i t i n g t o B r o a d e n S k i l l s
Another concern is ensuring that archivists acquire the new technological skills necessary to manage archives in the twenty-first century. Archivists in every kind of repository daily confront the challenges brought by electronic records. We are also developing a variety of new communication and access tools to facilitate and widen use of the records in our care. Both of these require a level of technical expertise that has not commonly been widespread among history and humanities graduates.
Archival graduate educators will be constantly challenged to upgrade cur-ricula and incorporate the new technologies as records and access tools evolve. They should continue and expand their collaborations with other academic departments that can supply the technical knowledge and skills their graduates will need, and integrate them into their curricula. The archival profession may also have to look beyond traditional library schools and history departments to find students with the requisite technical skills. We are not alone in needing these new skills, however, and may face stiff competition from allied professions when seeking qualified graduates. A reported 61% of new hires within libraries
belonging to the Association of Research Libraries were systems librarians and technologists.20
The need for technological skills is not a problem that can be solved solely by retooling archival graduate education, however. Rapid and continuous changes in technology will require all archivists to upgrade their skills frequently throughout their careers, so that even those completing the best graduate pro-grams will need ongoing access to other professional-development opportunities. A different kind of skill-development challenge is presented by the fact that large numbers of people come to their first archival job in middle age. The A*CENSUS shows that for nearly two-thirds of today’s archivists, archives is a second career. Among those entering the field most recently (2000-2004), the proportion exceeds three-quarters. Even more striking, these newest second-career entrants had a mean age of 47.6 years (see Table 3.7.4, Characteristics of those who report entering archival work from another field, at www.archivists.org). This large number of practitioners who have not had graduate archival training and are in middle age when they begin their archival careers underscores the importance of continuing education. In no area is this more important than in technology.
Although some discussions in the past have framed graduate education and continuing education as an “either/or” option, the A*CENSUS underscores the need to strengthen and broaden the availability of both. Graduate programs provide an essential foundation for many coming into the field directly from college, and they support research and development activities that ultimately introduce important innovations to the profession. But we will also require a wide range of continuing education options to deliver vital training and profes-sional development to experienced and recently minted archivists alike, especially as new technologies emerge and the profession develops new practices to address them.
An intriguing prospect may work to combine the innovative research and intellectual rigor of graduate programs with the flexibility of continuing education programs. This approach would be especially beneficial to the second-career archivists coming to the field in their thirties and forties. Graduate educators could respond to the needs of these older “second-career archivists” by tailoring programs that would meet their special needs. A senior vice president of the nonprofit Civic Ventures organization notes that many Boomers plan to go onto another career after retiring from their current one. She suggests that they “are going to demand simpler, fast-track versions of traditional education programs in professions such as teaching and nursing.”21
20Lenzini, “The Graying of the Library Profession.”
Archival educators should consider how our own profession can shape new educational opportunities to ensure that middle-age and older career changers are prepared for the ever-evolving demands of archival work.
Action items:
• Ensure that graduate archival programs have sufficient coursework in new technologies to meet the rapidly changing demands of archival work.
• Reach beyond library schools and history departments to recruit individuals who can bring advanced technological skills to the profession.
• Tailor graduate education programs for older students, especially those coming to archives as a second career.
• Expand existing continuing education offerings and develop new ones to assist archivists in upgrading their knowledge and skills regularly throughout their careers.
• Make continuing education affordable and accessible through expanded distance-education opportunities, including Web-based training and self-directed modules.
T r a n s f e r r i n g C r i t i c a l K n o w l e d g e t o t h e N e x t G e n e r a t i o n
Even if we can recruit and retain a sufficient number of new and diverse archivists who have a solid set of skills, we must ensure that the considerable body of knowledge and insight acquired by current archival workers—along with the core values of the archival profession—are conveyed effectively to the next generation.22In periods in which turnover is more gradual, older workers
still in place can mentor new employees by helping them learn about collections and existing procedures over several months or even years. This may not be pos-sible as large numbers of current archivists leave, however, and the management of archival institutions passes to individuals who are relatively new to the field and to the repositories they are serving.
This same kind of challenge will be faced by our professional associa-tions because so many of the current leadership roles are filled by Boomers. Unless the Boomers make a deliberate effort to step aside from leadership positions, younger archivists may become frustrated by their inability to advance. We must provide leadership-development opportunities for younger members in order to ensure the long-term health of our institutions and associations.
22In a video produced for the Association of Research Libraries, Stanley Wilder notes that “the real prob-lem is not to preserve titles or methods, but rather to pass our values on to those who follow us.” Wilder, “Generational Change in Librarianship,” (2000) [video]. http://www.arl.org/stats/salary/demo.html.
Formal knowledge transfer processes are becoming more prevalent as employers recognize the need to fill this gap. They seek to convey two types of knowledge to younger workers:
Explicit knowledge, which is “information that can be easily explained and stored in databases or manuals,” and
Tacit knowledge, which is “much harder to capture and pass on because it
includes experience, stories, impressions and creative solutions.”23
During the 1970s, when the last generational turnover in the U.S. archival profession occurred, ensuring the transfer of explicit knowledge was arguably more critical than it is today. Although information about collections used to reside largely in the heads of the reference archivists, archival descriptive practices have made great strides in the last thirty years. Now the majority of archival repositories have finding aids in place that make it easier for everyone to obtain extensive and reliable information about collections.
Tacit knowledge is another matter. It will be important for the archival profession to think strategically about how tacit knowledge can be transferred to the next generation in both workplaces and associations. Some experts sug-gest shadowing, mentoring programs, and communities of practice—those informal, dynamic networks of knowledge sharing—as possible approaches to this transfer.
Federal and state government agencies have become especially active in this area as their workers age.24Because the A*CENSUS indicates that
govern-ment archivists are older than their peers in other types of institutions, this sector will be the first affected in our profession. Some government repositories, including the National Archives and Records Administration, the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, and the New York State Archives, are already instituting formal knowledge transfer programs. We in the profession should watch the development of these programs and broaden our collective efforts in this area.
The archival profession may have a cache of expertise and commitment within our own ranks, specifically among members of the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA). As Diffendal finds in her special consultant’s report, “Certified Archivists in the A*CENSUS,” certified archivists as a group have greater longevity in the profession, among other distinguishing characteristics. Significantly, 43% of certified archivists indicated that their ties to the profession were very strong, compared with 22% of the profession at large. This
23Susannah Patton, “Beating the Boomer Brain Drain,” CIO (February 12, 2006). http:// www.cio.com.au/pp.php?id=1594109736&fp=16&fpid-0.
24Kathleen Murphy, “Aging to Take Toll on State Workforces,” Stateline.org (April 1, 2005). http:// www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&contentId=22518.
ACA group could be viewed as a corps to be enlisted in devising strategies for knowledge transfer.
Studies of the Boomer generation indicate that its members are likely to remain active well into retirement. The nonprofit organization Civic Ventures, in addition to its advocacy of new patterns of education, is leading an initiative called Next Chapter that is working “to connect older people with opportuni-ties to do good work, either as paid employees or volunteers.” It is helping libraries, community colleges, and other local entities across the country to set up programs and gathering spots where people nearing retirement can “get directions and connections.”25 Archivists could take advantage of this
generation’s desire for continued service to sustain a connection between the knowledge held by older workers and that needed by younger ones.
Action items:
• In addition to technological skills, education providers should develop or expand professional development opportunities to include leader-ship retreats and/or institutes for midcareer archivists, as well as work-study opportunities and internships.
• Repositories should consider now how to establish systematic methods for transferring knowledge from older to younger workers.
• Older members of professional associations should work to engage younger professionals in leadership roles within organizations and provide opportunities for growth and advancement.
S t r e n g t h e n i n g t h e A r c h i v a l P r o f e s s i o n ’ s I n f r a s t r u c t u r e
In addition to addressing the profession-wide challenges presented by the change of generations, the A*CENSUS casts a spotlight on specific areas of the archival infrastructure in the United States that should be improved in order to ensure that the profession is ready to meet these challenges.
G r e a t e r A c c e s s t o C o n t i n u i n g E d u c a t i o n O p p o r t u n i t i e s T h r o u g h C o l l a b o r a t i o n
Zimmelman, in her special consultant’s report, “A*CENSUS: Report on Continuing Education,” examines the desire among archival professionals for more training—and especially more specialized training—throughout their careers. She notes that interest is high at all levels, that distance is a barrier to obtaining such training, and that cost is a major issue. She also observes that archivists turn to professional associations as sources of this training.
